Efectos de la calidad de servicio y de la satisfacción del cliente sobre la fidelidad a los servicios oficiales de postventa de automoción españoles

Abstract

Service quality and customer satisfaction have been considered traditionally as the main drivers of customer loyalty. This has been also the case for the aftersales service of the automotive industry, a highly profitable economic sector with yearly sales over € 12,000 million in Spain. The companies operating in this sector dedicate a remarkable amount of their resources to the improvement of service quality, especially in the case of those brands positioned in the higher price segment, which are also known as premium brands. The main goal of this research is to evaluate whether this strategy suits to the customer behavior in Spain. Based on a sample of around 17,000 service customers from the official service networks of 2 automotive manufacturers, one from the upper segment and one from the middle segment, a longitudinal study has been carried out over 2 years. The reported levels of both customer satisfaction and perceived service quality, together with other variables, have been linked to the subsequent customer purchase behavior (both towards the workshop and towards the brand’s official service network). Several techniques have been used for this purpose, including multiple classification analysis, automatic interaction detection analysis (AID) and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results of this analysis dismiss service quality and customer satisfaction as central drivers of customer loyalty. Their impact is not only lower than expected, but also other variables show higher impacts on customer satisfaction, like the warranty of the vehicle. As a consequence, contractual retention strategies (e.g. service contracts, warranty extensions) increase in importance versus psychological retention for the automotive aftersales sector in Spain.